


This Is The End, If You Want It

by carlizzlerose



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 18:07:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1574747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlizzlerose/pseuds/carlizzlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you have no choice but to wait and die, you might as well dance until the music stops.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is The End, If You Want It

**Author's Note:**

> A friend showed me a post on tumblr that was like "imagine your otp slow dancing during the apocalypse" and that's all there was to it, really. This piece could probably use some polishing, but I'm impatient. Enjoy!

He turns the volume up all the way, and the machine starts pulsating a sound that's unrecognizable as music until a good seven seconds into the song. When the stereo plays, it’s crackled and distorted from disuse, wavering like it threatens to cut out and leave them in silence, but it doesn't. The boy crosses his arms over his chest and smiles.

The girl looks up from her spot on the sofa, and her facial expression tells him music is a stupid waste of energy, and he knows this. The judgement is obligatory but neither Dave nor Rose move to turn the stereo off. The girl remains with her hands in her lap and the boy’s eyes close behind his shades, symbolic to nobody but him. It’s like an itch beneath the skin, or sweltering through the night: he probably won’t remember it when its done with, but god, does it hurt in the moment. It gnaws at him, each hit of the baseline a carcinogenic reminder.

He knows he won’t be able to swing this again. The loss of music shouldn't be such a toll in the scheme of things, but it is.

The track skips and the CD moves on, leaving behind the downbeat for a slower refrain, more akin to what Rose would listen to than Dave. He understands, it reminds him of the stillness of the girl on the couch. The boy is competitive and all stillness, to him, demands to be broken by moment. He slips his shades off and folds them, their arm hooking in on the neckline of his t-shirt.

The girl looks up to red eyes and an outstretched hand, fingers curled upwards in minute hesitation, a warning that regards her possible touch as fever. There’s enough chill and heaviness to hurt, but before the music ends its somber prologue, she fills his hand with hers.

He leads her to the center of the small apartment's main room, making grace and unfamiliarity of the space they've spent the last two weeks holed up, waiting for some kind of end to take them. There have been good nights where they laugh because either wine or time has gotten to them, and bad nights where plates, and spirits, and pieces of each of them break a little, and worse mornings where each sidesteps the glass and nothing heals.

A good night is rare; they remember the other is warm and no one sleeps alone.

The song is slow enough to ask the question for him. When he pulls her to him, she’s already accepted. The last time something in him broke, he thought it was his vocal chords, and he swallowed down fragments until it was impossible to put back together. Now he doesn't speak without necessity, as if his voice has the capacity to run out too. Maybe he believes when things fall apart, they’ll have no vessel through which to understand each other and say important things, nothing gentle to cover death's laborious breath until morning sees him out, unwelcome until nightfall where in the dark, anyone could die.

“You know, I’m a pretty good dancer.” He looks her in the eye with enough confidence to provoke a turn of her lips, a tilt of her chin downwards.

“No, you’re not.”

Whether his exhale is a sigh or a laugh doesn’t matter as much as his hands, grappling for her waist like they’d rather the world end sooner than regular logic might decide. There’s new urgency and the moment is shorter and neither feels quite as fragile as the other. It’s easy to mistake not-quite-fragility for strength, but in the case of David Strider, he is hardly six feet, hardly a man, and there’s no room for strength in those sullen eyes.

She leans her temple against his and from then, it's a battle of who can shut their eyes tighter, each strangling that last bit of light from not-quite-desensitized retinas and giving in to darkness that only feels like safety in company. The girl’s arms wind around his neck and stay.

She doesn't remember the exact moment she realized everyone was going to die. It’s possible that she knew for years but waited until the last moment to acknowledge it because eulogies are much prettier in theory than in practice. When it got harder to deny, she started to write them. Her own, her mother’s, the Earth’s, each an apology that would remain long after her. Maybe just a memory of an atom, maybe all of their wholeness devoured by a new species still lightyears away, but never again by her. And never by Dave.

“Rose,” his voice comes out no louder than a whisper, hot, careful breath warming the empty space by her ear. Her grip around him tightens.

“Shut up,” she breathes the words in his direction more than she speaks them, afraid of what might sound in her voice if she spoke with tangibility. Air can’t bruise.

“Can I say-”

“No.”

She can’t hear the building in his throat, but it’s there, like a tumor, like a cancer. He was right, her touch was a fever and it spreads now. His hands on the small of her back are shaking and he wants so badly to say goodbye to her.

What people say about goodbyes, it's not true. They’re not the end. They’re just a way of promising that if things go wrong, the sky cares enough to collapse and if they go right, he has every right to smirk like he always knew it’d play out that way.

‘This isn’t goodbye’ is what children say when they have no sense of what castles are and how long the night lasts when brothers don’t wake up and the sunset is just blood on canvas and in mouths and on pages of books and guns are in everybody’s hands and everyone sleeps alone.

Each holds the other tightly enough to hurt, but it doesn’t. It’s beautifully numb and the cancer spreads into fists that close around the disease’s throat like the cure is to asphyxiate, even if that means to die.

Because everyone does.

The girl feels small and the boy hollow and nobody says goodbye. As they sway back and forth, barely moving at all, he can feel the displacement of bodies, where warmth turns to cold and if he had anything more to say to her, it’s gone now.

The song comes to an end, but no next song plays. A whirring sounds from the generator above their heads, like a downfall, one that burns out light bulbs in cracks of heat and finality. The music is dead.


End file.
